Previous research suggests that social anxiety symptoms are maintained and intensified by inflexible emotion regulation (ER). Therefore, we examined whether trait-level social anxiety moderates ER flexibility operationalised at both between-person (covariation between variability in emotional intensity and variability in strategy use across occasions) and within-person (associations between emotional intensity and strategy use on a given day) levels. In a sample of healthy college-aged adults (N = 185, Mage = 21.89), we examined overall and emotion-specific intensities (shame, guilt, anxiety, anger, sadness) (...) and regulatory strategies (i.e. experiential avoidance, expressive suppression, and rumination) in response to each day’s most emotionally intense event over 6 days. During the study period, we found a positive association between variability in emotional intensity and variability of experiential avoidance in individuals with lower, rather than higher, levels of trait social anxiety after controlling for key covariates (i.e. gender, personality traits, and stress exposure). However, we did not find evidence for the moderating role of trait social anxiety in ER flexibility assessed at within-person levels. Our findings highlight the need to delineate dynamic ER flexibility across everyday events. (shrink)

Using the pooled 1998?2000 GSS data, this study examines what kinds of parents tend to select non?public schools for their children, a question that is fundamental but lacks direct, adequate answers in the literature. The results of logistic regression analysis show that religion, socio?economic status, age, nativity, number of children and region play significant roles in parental choice of religious schools, but race, gender, urban residence and family composition make no difference. Parental socio?economic status is a key factor in determining (...) their choice of non?religious private schools. Currently, no significant differences in demographic, religious, socio?economic and family?structure characteristics can be detected with regard to which parents are more likely to home?school their children. Implications of the findings are considered. (shrink)

Ethical problems are continuing to expand in health care due to conflicts of technology and value. This study investigated what kind of ethical problems nurses face in clinical situations and what process they use in deciding on actions to take. Ethical theories in justice and caring were explored. Qualitative research was used and ethnographic analysis was conducted with six staff nurses from three clinical areas. An analysis of the data yielded an overarching theme of ‘Suffering and ethical caring: incompatible entities’. (...) Six domains were identified: informant definitions, preceding conditions, actions taken, intervening variables, risks and recommendations. Future research is needed in the field of client and family suffering and pain. (shrink)

The ordering tendency in binary f -Ti solid solution containing 3sp or 4sp simple-metal or 3d transition-metal solute is investigated systematically by the linear muffin-tin orbital method within the atomic sphere approximation . We demonstrated that the effective pairwise interaction energy in a solid solution is equal to half the solute-solute interaction energies and can be evaluated by a supercell total energy approach. The calculations of EPI energy both with and without volume relaxation of the supercells and local density of (...) states show that the EPI energies of Ti-SM and Ti-TM solutions are dominated by different factors. For Ti-SM solutions, the EPI energies are of large absolute values with a negative sign, indicating strong ordering tendency in these solutions. The volume relaxation does not alter the EPI energy substantially. The calculated LDOS shows that the ordering tendency in Ti-SM solutions may be related to the hybridization between the electrons of the SM atoms when they are close to each other. For most Ti-TM solutions, if calculated without relaxation, the absolute EPI energies are very small; however, if calculated with relaxation, they are of relatively large positive values, indicating a clustering tendency in these solutions. By combining the calculated EPI energy and Flinn's model for short-range order strengthening, the increase in critical shear stress ‰ sro due to SRO is estimated for Ti-SM alloys, and the results qualitatively agree with experiment. (shrink)

Using the pooled 1998–2000 GSS data, this study examines what kinds of parents tend to select non‐public schools for their children, a question that is fundamental but lacks direct, adequate answers in the literature. The results of logistic regression analysis show that religion, socio‐economic status, age, nativity, number of children and region play significant roles in parental choice of religious schools, but race, gender, urban residence and family composition make no difference. Parental socio‐economic status is a key factor in determining (...) their choice of non‐religious private schools. Currently, no significant differences in demographic, religious, socio‐economic and family‐structure characteristics can be detected with regard to which parents are more likely to home‐school their children. Implications of the findings are considered. (shrink)

Four experiments examined the strategies that individuals develop in sentential reasoning. They led to the discovery of five different strategies. According to the theory proposed in the paper, each of the strategies depends on component tactics, which all normal adults possess, and which are based on mental models. Reasoners vary their use of tactics in ways that have no deterministic account. This variation leads different individuals to assemble different strategies, which include the construction of incremental diagrams corresponding to mental models, (...) and the pursuit of the consequences of a single model step by step. Moreover, the difficulty of a problem (i.e., the number of mental models required by the premises) predisposes reasoners towards certain strategies. Likewise, the sentential connectives in the premises also bias reasoners towards certain strategies, e.g., conditional premises tend to elicit reasoning step by step whereas disjunctive premises tend to elicit incremental diagrams. (shrink)

Event-related desynchronization, as a proxy for mirror neuron activity, has been used as a neurophysiological marker for motor execution after mirror visual feedback. Using EEG, this study investigated ERD upon the immediate effects of single-session MVF in unimanual arm movements compared with the ERD effects occurring without a mirror, in two groups: stroke patients with left hemiplegia and their healthy counterparts. During EEG recordings, each group performed one session of mirror therapy training in three task conditions: with a mirror, with (...) no mirror, and with a covered mirror. An asymmetry index was calculated from the subtraction of the event-related spectrum perturbations between the C3 and C4 electrodes located over the sensorimotor cortices contralateral and ipsilateral to the moved arm. Results of the effect of task versus group in contralateral and ipsilateral motor areas showed that there was a significant effect of task condition at the contralateral motor area in the high beta band at C3. High beta ERD showed that the suppression was greater over the contralateral hemisphere than it was over the ipsilateral hemisphere in both study groups. The magnitude of low beta ERD in patients with stroke was more suppressed in contralesional C3 under the no mirror compared to that of the covered mirror and similarly more suppressed in ipsilesional C4 ERD under the no mirror compared to that of the mirror condition. The correlation analysis revealed that the magnitude of ERSP power correlated significantly with arm severity in the low and high beta bands in patients with stroke, and a higher asymmetry index in the low beta band was associated with higher arm functioning under the no-mirror condition. There was a shift in sensorimotor ERD toward the contralateral hemisphere as induced by MVF accompanying unimanual movement in both stroke patients and healthy controls. The use of ERD in the low beta band as a neurophysiological marker to indicate the relationships between the amount of MVF-induced ERD attenuation and motor severity, and the outcome indicator for improving stroke patients’ neuroplasticity in clinical trials using MVF are warranted to be explored in the future. (shrink)

In two experiments, we examined whether POWER is embodied in terms of horizontal forward and backward movement using an action compatibility task. Participants were asked to categorize power-relate...

In amblyopia, abnormal visual experience during development leads to an enduring loss of visual acuity in adulthood. Physiological studies in animal models suggest that intracortical GABAergic inhibition may mediate visual deficits in amblyopia. To better understand the relationship between visual cortical γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and perceptual suppression in persons with amblyopia (PWA), we employed magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to quantify GABA levels in both PWA and normally-sighted persons (NSP). In the same individuals, we obtained psychophysical measures of perceptual suppression for (...) a variety of ocular configurations. In PWA, we found a robust negative correlation between the depth of amblyopia (the difference in visual acuity between the amblyopic and non-amblyopic eyes) and GABA concentration that was specific to visual cortex and was not observed in a sensorimotor cortical control region. Moreover, lower levels of visual cortical GABA were associated with weaker perceptual suppression of the fellow eye by the amblyopic eye and stronger suppression of the amblyopic eye by the fellow eye. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that intracortical GABAergic inhibition is an important component of the pathology of human amblyopia and suggest possible therapeutic interventions to restore vision in the amblyopic eye through enhancement of visual cortical GABAergic signaling in PWA. (shrink)